How real is real?

Well, I've been sitting around painting my Fallschirmjager & missing my BabyDoll. She's in Vegas at a trade show, and I'm here with Memphis our Golden Retriever. We're both bummed. She's tearing to shit any stuffed animal she can find, and I'm feverishly painting 13 FJ in tropical camo. I've also rewatched the entire Band of Brothers series, The Eagle has Landed, Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, and a drum instructional dvd by master player Steve Smith. Yes, we miss our BabyDoll...

I'm finished with the 7 or 8 stages of layering, highlighting, inking, & relayering, when I reach that final point last night where a decision had to be made.

I finished watching Black Hawk Down and went to bed. I've got work to do at the office at 1pm, so here I sit, writing this for lack of anything better to do.

Anyway, enough whinging.

Every well painted Splinter B pattern German FJ camo job I've seen does something that doesn't make any sense to me except that its done for effect. That is, the green lines or hash marks that cover most of the smock are painted to be visible on a 28mm mini's smock, but I think this is incorrect.

The effect of taking a man wearing pattern B and shrinking him down to 28mm would mean that we would lose a lot of details that we could see at full size. That being said, the small, thin green hash marks would go to. We wouldn't be able to see them at that size. Moreover, the overall effect would be to slightly 'haze' the beige smock color.

Since my aforementioned BabyDoll has the camera with her in Vegas, I can't very well show you what effect I'm talking about, but I've managed to capture it on my figs.

"Well you're just saying that cuz you can't paint 'em that small" says the Mushroom Man in the back of the room. Listen, I can paint the warts on a Gnat's ass. I can certainly paint tiny green lines on beige color. I just happen to think that it isn't realistic looking when considered in that size.

So, with nods of support for every guy and gal out there who have painted visible lines in 28mm, I must contend that it doesn't represent what IMO, Splinter B would look like up close at that scale.

With this in mind, I also noticed that there is a much larger area of beige on the figs that have the lines, than on mine, which looks proportionally closer to the actual camouflage smock in real life.

Of course, this could just all be in my head. Anyway, work progresses on the baker's dozen I'm painting. I'll likely be finished with them by the end of the week, when my BabyDoll returns and brings with her the camera.

So, I'll post a new poll about lines or no lines.